With rapidly growing trend of mobile and remote data access over a high-speed communication network such as 3G or 4G cellular services, accurately delivering data becomes increasingly challenging and difficult. The high-speed communication network which is capable of delivering information includes, but not limited to, a wireless network, a cellular network, wireless personal area network (“WPAN”), wireless local area network (“WLAN”), wireless metropolitan area network (“MAN”), or the like. While WPAN can be Bluetooth or ZigBee, WLAN may be a Wi-Fi network in accordance with IEEE 802.11 WLAN standards.
A problem, however, associated with transmitting a stream data signal through a network is that the strength of data signals may be affected or degraded due to various different reasons. For example, a physical media channel or wireless transmission channel can introduce noise if many sets of data streams try to use the channel to reach their destination. Traveling distance can also degrade signal strength. To improve accuracy of signal decoding, a conventional approach for more accurate reading of a received signal is to use the soft information. For instance, instead of traditional method of receiving and decoding signals using hard information, such as “1” or “zero”, the soft information offers more information about the received signals, such as “strong 1,” “relative strong 1,” “relative weak 1,” “strong 0,” “relative strong 0,” “relative weak 0,” and the like.
A drawback associated with using the soft information is the large size of information that typically requires a larger storage space for storing such information as well as higher bandwidth for transferring such information.